Death Stranding 2 PC performance: How well does it run?

The PC port of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is as good as you would hope, given how excellent the first game was.

Visuals are able to be stretched further than they go on PS5 Pro, but only in the sense of image quality and detail; there aren’t any options for any raytracing modes or the like, but really, the game still looks excellent in spite of this, with the Death Stranding 2 cast practically jumping out of the screen.

However, like other PlayStation ports, you need a more powerful system than you would expect to get equivalent performance and visuals, but seeing as the PS5 is reaching six years old, this becomes less of an issue with each passing year.

If you don’t have a system as powerful as a PS5, then the settings can also go much lower, opening the door to many new players.

When you start a new game, there is a short shader compilation, which seems to be fairly extensive, though we did see the odd stutter in cutscenes.

Perhaps most interesting about the PC port is the inclusion of Guerilla Games’ PICO (Progressive Image Compositor), an upscaler that is akin to Epic Games’ own TSR in Unreal Engine 5, in that it is an in-house upscaler, separate from other upscalers such as DLSS, FSR and XeSS from other hardware vendors. It was first used in Horizon: Forbidden West on the PS5 Pro, and Death Stranding 2 marks its first PC outing.

If you have an Nvidia GPU, you’ll most likely want to stick with DLSS, especially if you have less powerful hardware, as DLSS Model L in Ultra Performance affords players very decent image quality, even when upscaling to 4K, and generally offers a more favourable end resolve compared to PICO.

PICO becomes more interesting when playing Death Stranding 2 on hardware that doesn’t support machine-learning-based upscalers, such as AMD RX6000/7000 GPUs and non-Intel-based handheld PCs, such as the Steam Deck and ROG Ally X, though PICO still exhibits artefacts, especially around hair and the edges of clouds.

If you own an AMD RX 9000 class of GPU, you can make use of FSR4, though we weren’t able to test this, and as such, cannot comment on how PICO compares to it.

With a Razer Blade 17 laptop equipped with an Nvidia RTX 3080Ti 16GB GPU, 32GB DDR5-4800 RAM and an Intel i9-12900H, we could hit 60FPS with DLSS 4.5 Model L in Ultra Performance mode with medium settings and texture quality set to high, whilst retaining good image quality, though shadows and hair exhibited dithering.

Character models are the real highlight, but this was already the case on PlayStation 5; if you have a powerful enough system, then they shine all the more.

If you have a VRR display, you can use DLSS Balanced Mode for a sharper image while dropping frames. This becomes less of an issue when playing with a controller, as you more readily feel the change in framerate with a mouse. If you’re happy to sit back with a controller, you can have a great experience at 40FPS.

If you can run it at higher framerates, then Death Stranding 2 becomes surprisingly snappy for being a third-person game, and more so if you make use of features such as Nvidia Reflex.

And though it has nothing to do with the visual presentation of the game, it must be said that the audio fidelity is sublime. We cannot recommend playing Death Stranding 2 with a pair of good headphones or speakers enough, as in our opinion, the sound quality is just as impressive as the visuals.

Ultimately, most players should be able to run Death Stranding 2: On the Beach on their PC just fine, so long as they reasonably adjust their expectations.

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